WATERY DEPTHS, Earth -- An emotionally troubled sperm whale has had repeated attempts to kill himself thwarted by well-meaning but misguided activists. “Every time I find myself a nice warm beach to grant me sweet relief, I get swamped by fuckwits with dreadlocks covering me in giant wet sacks,” the depressed cetacean said. “In the middle of nowhere. Where do they come from?”

The whale puts his funk down to an acute case of loneliness. “The ocean is a very big place on your own. People keep saying ‘there are plenty more fish in the sea’. But where are all these fish? I haven’t seen them.”

Alienated from his pod, taking no joy in whale-song, and “unable to face eating even one more lousy ton of krill”, the majestic but melancholy mammal decided to strand himself on remote Ocean Bay beach in Tasmania. “I was starting to drift off painlessly,” he said. “Closed my eyes for a moment – and suddenly there’s a hundred volunteers, a bulldozer, a helicopter, and a small fleet of boats pushing me back into the sea.”

“I made a last ditch effort to get back into the shallows, but they dragged me right out again,” he said. “Just thinking about the sheer futility of it all makes me want to die even more.”

The same activists later prevented the mass suicide of an apocalyptic cult of dolphins.

Determined to carry through his plan, the whale headed for the cooler waters of Antarctica, and the path of a Japanese whaling vessel. “Those guys are crack shots with a harpoon,” he said. “Or they would be, if there wasn’t an inflatable boat in the way with Daryl Hannah on board.”

The whale has since resolved to follow Exxon tankers around “for as long as it takes”.